Rural Educators Denounce Planned Revision of P.L.94-142

Murray, Ky.--Services to handicapped students living in rural areas
would effectively be eliminated under the Reagan Administration's
proposed funding cuts and changes in P.L.94-142, the 1975 law
protecting the educational rights of all handicapped children, charged
an alliance of 60 special-education teachers and administrators meeting
here recently.

Founded last year by educators interested in improving services to
rural handicapped students, the American Council on Rural Special
Education (acres) held its second annual meeting at Murray State
University in an atmosphere of discouragement, because, as participants
from across the country charged, their projects will be the hardest-hit
of all programs for handicapped students.

Plans Denounced

Speakers denounced the Reagan Administration's plans to reduce
federal aid to their programs, to administer handicapped education
through block grants, and to weaken accompanying regulations in its
fiscal 1983 budget plan.

The President's proposal calls for aid to elementary and secondary
special-education programs to be cut by 30 percent in 1983, from $2.14
billion in 1982 to $1.49 billion in 1983.

Along with the budget cuts, the President is proposing to administer
special-education programs through state block grants and discretionary
programs grants.

The Administration is also planning broad reductions in regulations.
The changes would narrow the definition of handicapped children, reduce
"due process" requirements, cut reporting and evaluation rules, and
eliminate the "parental consent" requirement.

Rural students, acres members argued, will suffer more than their
urban and suburban counterparts from these proposed changes for several
reasons.

Handicapped children living in rural areas generally have more
complex problems, studies have shown, because rural areas have had
higher incidences of "handicapping conditions" than urban areas, and
the conditions have been aggravated by past neglect, the educators
said. Prior to the 1975 regulations, which required care of rural
handicapped students, it was not cost-efficient to provide care for
them and there was no federal requirement to do so, they added.

(There are 15 million students in rural areas, rural-education
researchers say, and as many as 1.8 million of these may be
handicapped. Differing definitions of "rural" and "handicapped" make
this an inexact estimate, according to the researchers.)

Financial Burden

A sparsely populated school district will often have only one or two
students affected by a certain disability and requiring a specific
program. In these cases, the educators said, the cost of providing
special teachers, facilities, and transportation presents a much
greater financial burden to a rural system than to a school district
with a larger handicapped population to justify the expense.

When small school districts cannot justify the expense of educating
these high-cost children, they sometimes choose to ignore the law,
participants said.

For this reason, they added, they are especially fearful of one
aspect of the Administration's proposal: the plan to shift the
responsibility for enforcing compliance with regulations like those of
P.L. 94-142 from the Education Department to the Justice
Department.

The shift, they said, would have a particularly devastating effect
on rural special-education programs, even if Congress is successful in
blocking the President's other initiatives.

Under the plan, the Administration's proposed education foundation
could request compliance of school districts that refuse to provide
special-education services to students, but only the Justice Department
would have the authority to bring suit against systems that ignore
federal requirements.

"That's potentially very dangerous, because the reports that we see
about voluntary [compliance] scare me," said Doris Helge, executive
director of acres and an associate professor of special education at
Murray State.

"We had a reason for getting the federal government [to pursue legal
complaints]," she added. "When they're left alone, principals don't do
it."

Ms. Helge cited a study she directed for the Education Department
that concluded that most rural school administrators are unable or
unwilling to maintain special-education programs without the spur of
federal requirements.

Waiting Is Typical

"It is typical for [a school district] to wait for a mandate saying
education must be improved, and P.L. 94-142 has been the only type of
motivation which would have created real special-education programs,"
the report quoted one administrator as saying.

Ms. Helge added that the study, which was based on random interviews
with school administrators across the country, also found a 92-percent
increase in the number of students brought into rural special-education
programs as a result of the 1975 law.

Despite these concerns, council members said Congress has become
more responsive to the needs of students in small communities. Rural
groups are speaking out more effectively now, Ms. Helge said, pointing
out that the Congressional Rural Caucus has increased its membership by
33 percent in the the last year. And recent Census reports, she said,
show a continuing migration from the cities to the country.

The "rural renaissance" that such changes may signal, the rural
educators said, could provide the strength needed to turn back the
Reagan initiatives.

Web Only

Notice: We recently upgraded our comments. (Learn more here.) If you are logged in as a subscriber or registered user and already have a Display Name on edweek.org, you can post comments. If you do not already have a Display Name, please create one here.

Ground Rules for Posting
We encourage lively debate, but please be respectful of others. Profanity and personal attacks are prohibited. By commenting, you are agreeing to abide by our user agreement.
All comments are public.